Paris is hosting a bilateral conference to help Ukraine resist and rebuild after the war with Russia. The objective: to identify the immediate needs of Ukrainians and how to meet them, and to help them recover from the conflict once it is over. The meeting comes as winter sets in and the humanitarian situation there is deteriorating.
After almost ten months of war, France is hosting an international conference to help Ukraine make it through the winter, plan the country's reconstruction and promote French participation in these efforts, according to France’s ministry of the economy.
Representatives from 47 states and roughly 20 international organisations will be represented at the conference alongside 500 French companies, investment funds and industrial actors in order to define the most urgent priorities and coordinate their response efforts.
'Understand the civilian population's needs'
The armed conflict in Ukraine appears destined to last for quite some time. For Caroline Brandao, a researcher in international humanitarian responses, international solidarity is not as strong as it was a few months ago. “We have, perhaps, arrived at a moment when we need to look at the paths we can take to show that the world has not lost interest in the conflict,” she suggested. “This conference can send a message of hope to Ukrainians, but it must not be full of empty promises.”
The most important and urgent challenge is to help the population as winter sets in and Russian strikes continue targeting the country’s energy infrastructure. “There’s no power, no electricity, no water. Living in the these conditions is double punishment for vulnerable people like children or the handicapped, those who have not been able to flee."
Despite the billions of euros being poured into helping the population, “the humanitarian response has not been good enough”, said Brandao. “We need to meet the needs of the civilian population.”
According to the UN’s human rights chief Volker Turk, 17.7 million people are in need of humanitarian aid and 9.3 million need food aid and sustenance.
Lean on local government and civil society
On the ground, coordination between NGOs and Ukrainian organisations has run into difficulties. Humanitarian actors, which are used to operating in failed states, arrived in Ukraine with badly adjusted methods and were technologically outperformed by the Ukrainians.
“At the start of the conflict”, explained Francois Grunewald, Director General of France's Group Urgence Rehabilitation Development (URD), an independent institute specialising in humanitarian practices, “they had to confront the very different dynamics of Ukrainian civil society, which is highly digitalised.”
Ukrainian civil society groups quickly organised themselves on Facebook and Telegram. “We had two disconnected groups that took a lot of time to begin coordinating with each other,” he said.
One way to better coordinate would be to go through local collectives. “Municipal and civil society groups are at the heart of any humanitarian response,” said Grunewald. "There is no existing mechanism, at the moment, that works directly with the municipalities, despite the fact that they need money to stock up on necessities.”
According to Grunewald, urban zones should be targeted first. "People in rural areas are getting by with wood fires. In cities, all the heating infrastructure has been destroyed and needs replacing.”
Raze everything to rebuild everything
Thinking about the aftermath, about reconstruction in the mid-term, is one of the priorities of the conference taking place on December 13. “It will give hope to Ukrainians,” explained the URD's director. “The suburbs of Kharkiv, for example, are an ocean of ruins. In the east, the crucial economic and industrial infrastructure - including old Soviet factories - is seriously damaged. Everything will have to be razed in order to rebuild, and that will take a long time.”
The World Bank estimates that the reconstruction of Ukraine’s damaged infrastructure will cost over 500 billion dollars.
“The humanitarian consequences of the war are catastrophic”, declared the vice-president of the World Bank, Anna Bjerde, speaking to the Austrian newspaper Die Press. “Without infrastructure, there is no economy, the Ukrainian state has no tax revenue.” Eight million people will be living in poverty in Ukraine by the end of 2022, she added. “The will raise the poverty level level from 2 to 25% of the population.”
The European Commission thinks Russia should pay. “Russia and its oligarchs need to compensate Ukraine for the destruction and cover the costs of rebuilding the country,” underscored Commission President Ursula von der Leyen during a press conference on November 30.
Russia has the means to do this, according to von der Leyen, who proposed using "certain Russian assets" frozen under EU sanctions. Some 300 billion euros of Central Russian Bank reserves were frozen at the start of the war as well as 19 billion euros of assets belonging to Russian oligarchs.
A long list of participants
Access to energy, food, health and transport: all these issues will be broached at the conference to be held at the French ministry of economics and finance on Tuesday. The conference also aims to identify concrete solutions for the very short term, according to the French presidency.
In addition to the 500 French enterprises hoping to participate in the reconstruction of Ukraine, France has invited almost 70 high level participants from Ukraine’s main allies and international partners. Attendance by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been confirmed, as well as the virtual participation of UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Ukraine’s First Lady, Olena Zelensky, is slated to deliver a speech to the conference.
This page has been translated from the original in French.
